Be Quiet
by Baxaronn
Summary: Kakashi may or may not have a cold or something. Chapter 3: Kakashi's students are so worried about his health that they break into his house.
1. Chapter 1

Hey there. Read this.

Unless 'ass' counts as a swear word, I'm pretty sure I didn't curse in this one, even once. Amazing. I don't normally manage that.

* * *

Normally when he finds that he needs to sneeze, Kakashi will stop himself. Anything to prevent unnecessary noise; a shinobi must always be prepared, even if the situation doesn't call for it. And he doesn't like sneezing, because it makes the inside of his mask pretty gross. It isn't very hard to stop a sneeze, at least not for him–just a matter of concentrated breathing, and maybe rubbing the bridge of his nose a little, and nothing happens. In desperate, unstoppable sneezing situations, pinching his nostrils closed makes it much quieter than it would otherwise have been, which is better than nothing. A shinobi must always be willing to make slight compromises, even if it means having itchy sinuses for up to a few minutes.

And the first few times his face tried to make him sneeze, he stopped it, as usual. But this one is persistent, and every time it fades away it tries again a few seconds later. So, in a rare case of laxness, and only because it doesn't actually matter right now or even most of the time whether people can hear him or not while he's in his own village, he decides to let his guard down for a moment to let himself sneeze. Once.

"Kakashi-sensei, why are you sneezing?" Naruto asks.

"...pointless question," Sasuke grunts.

"Naruto, we're in the middle of something!" Sakura yells.

Quickly Kakashi is forced to admit to himself the main reason he doesn't usually sneeze in public; because certain people overreact to everything he does. So concerned about one of the least important things Kakashi has ever done, Naruto, in the middle of a training exercise he's supposed to care about performing, drops what he's doing and _bounds_ across the two or three meter distance between the two of them to ask for more details. Kakashi is sitting on a bench with both feet on the floor, and Naruto decides that he has permission to put his hands on his thighs so he can propel his face as closely into Kakashi's as possible. "Are you okay?" he asks, looking up into Kakashi's eye and breathing on his chin, a look of obviously exaggerated concern on his face.

"Yes," Kakashi replies. He puts a hand on Naruto's forehead and gently pushes him away, grabs his wrists and removes them from his legs. "Don't climb on me."

Naruto shakes Kakashi off and moves in close again, though thankfully without touching him this time, eyes fixated on the underside of his nose. "You're not going to sneeze again, are you? Maybe you should take your mask off so you don't get boogers all over it."

"I won't," Kakashi says, shielding his face against Naruto's breath with his hand. "Now, don't let a small noise like that distract you from training. You're supposed to be practicing chakra manipulation, not invading other peoples' personal space."

"Shouldn't I be distracted by small noises?" Naruto argues. "A shinobi must be aware of everything going on around them, right? I was practicing noticing stuff!"

"Good job noticing, but there was no need to respond to something like that. Get back to work."

Naruto crinkles his nose and folds his arms. "This practice is boring, all we're doing is crushing gravel," he complains. Beneath them the ground is primarily loose stones, and he kicks at them, because he couldn't think any less of gravel right now. Kakashi is very good at reading faces, and Naruto's says that gravel is annoying. Stupid gravel. Gravel is stupid. "Can't we do something more interesting? I don't have time for this butt stuff."

"Says the only one who hasn't done anything more than split a clod of peat yet," provides Sasuke, standing a few feet away and scowling like his life depends on it. The front of his shirt is powdered with grey dust he hasn't bothered to brush off. "You haven't even _learned_ the basics, let alone mastered them. Get over yourself."

Slighted, Naruto's mouth opens to respond, but is covered by Sakura's hand before any words are released. He tries to pry her arm away, but her grip is too strong for him and he cannot. "Don't start something because you're not doing the drills!" she growls. She lets him go and he gasps for air, rubbing his cheek where her nails pressed into his skin. She puts her fists on her hips and sneers at him. "You're supposed to be practicing, not complaining!"

Naruto frowns and looks at his feet. "I'm not-"

Sakura stoops down, picks up a rock, places it in Naruto's hand. "No."

The front of her dress is soiled by mineral dust as well, though she has been more diligent in avoiding it than Sasuke, whose shirt is so filthy that you would only know it was blue if you saw him from behind. Naruto's shirt is dirty as well, but not any more so than it would be midway through any training session; grass stains and dirt smears abound, but there is no evidence on his clothes that he has successfully crushed even one rock yet. Which he hasn't. Kakashi isn't paying much attention, but he doesn't need to even be listening to know exactly what Naruto is doing at all times.

Sakura turns to Kakashi and frowns. "Why are you sneezing, though?" she asks. "You're not getting sick, are you?"

Kakashi has to stop himself from rolling his eyes at his normally astute pupil. The suppressed sarcastic gesture comes out as a sigh and a dismissive wave of the hand instead. "Nice of you to be concerned, but I've only sneezed once today," he says. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

This is, apparently, the wrong answer. Sakura crosses her arms over her chest and pouts the poutiest pout Kakashi has ever seen her pout before. "'A shinobi must prepare before it is too late to'," she quotes, drumming her fingers on her elbow. "Just because you're not already feeling sick doesn't mean you shouldn't be ready for it to happen! You know that, right?"

"Sometimes we must take things as we see them instead of just following the rules," Kakashi replies. A shinobi must prepare before it is too late to, but not if it's for something stupid like a cold. "There is nothing to prepare for here; I already know how to be sick. I would go so far as to say that the more one worries about getting sick, the more likely one is to actually become sick."

"Be that as it may, you should still be wary of what it _could_ be–"

"Hush your face," he commands. "It's just somebody gossiping about me. You know how interesting I am."

Sakura unknits her eyebrows and uncrosses her arms, grumbling quietly but dropping the conversation as asked. So close to convincing her to freaking leave him alone about this already, it is a shame, truly a shame, that Kakashi's body takes this exact moment as an opportunity to sneeze again.

"You did it again!" she accuses, jamming her index finger in his face. "If you're not sick, why does it happen more than once, huh?"

Kakashi scratches the side of his nostril through his mask. It doesn't accomplish much.

He says, "Sakura, even if I do have a cold, what is the big deal."

Sakura takes in a deep breath. "Well, first of all–"

"That wasn't a question. It is not a big deal, and it is not a good idea to react so strongly to something that hasn't happened yet. Drop the subject and keep training."

And, reluctantly, she finally does. One of the more difficult rules to adapt to is that a shinobi must always listen to their commander, no matter how unbelievably stupid you think they are being. And normally he would let her explain her objection instead of cutting her off, but he just doesn't have the patience today. Maybe he is getting sick. He's pretty sure he's not usually this dismissive. Is he being dismissive? Is he actually acting any differently than he normally does? It's hard to tell, but since his students don't seem confused by his behavior, it can't be _much_ different, if at all. Sasuke doesn't seem to mind, anyway. His eyes move between Naruto and Sakura.

"If you guys don't want to practice, that's your problem, but do it quieter and stop distracting me," he requests, bending over to pick up a rock about the size of his foot. He examines it with squinting eyes, glares at it, loses a staring contest with it as he tries to scrutinize a good location to focus his chakra on. He doesn't find one before Kakashi stands up and calls for attention.

"Training is officially over for today," he decides. "Continue practicing as long as you see fit. I'm going home." He waves at them as he turns to leave. "See you tomorrow!" he says with a smile that no one notices. Which is pretty much fine, because a shinobi must never show emotion or whatever even though the context of that rule isn't met when he's just been watching his students train all day and not doing anything himself besides sitting on his ass and staring into space.

Behind him, Naruto loudly accuses Sasuke of being a show-offy jerk. Sasuke responds by calling Naruto a sore loser. By the time Kakashi is far enough away that he can't see them effortlessly, he can still hear them yelling at each other. He sighs, pulls the front of his mask down to his neck, and sneezes.

* * *

I'm pretty sure I'm going to write a second chapter for this, jsyk. Thank you for reading! That was nice of you.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2, medium rare.

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Kakashi is definitely sick, and by the next day he can no longer deny it. Though he _can_ stop himself from exhibiting the telltale symptoms, the fact is that he has to go out of his way to stop himself from coughing or sneezing every fifteen seconds instead of not needing to do it in the first place. And stopping them is such a hassle, because they happen so often. Every fifteen seconds might be an exaggeration, but the amount of mucus he's dripped on and sneezed into the inside of his shirt since he put it on in the morning was enough that he changed into another one before leaving for work. His throat is so sore and scratchy that he can barely excuse himself for being four hours late for training.

"What was that, Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura asks, her cute little face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated irritation. "I didn't quite catch whatever completely unapologetic justification you have for making us wait around all day for you to show up and train us like you're supposed to!"

Kakashi clears his throat and swallows his spit and clears his throat again before repeating himself. "Actually, I did apologize this time," he claims, in words now decipherable. "I'm sorry I'm so much later than usual! I had a little trouble waking up this morning."

"'This time' is right! You never even pretend to care about how late you are!" Sakura puts her fists on her hips and glares at him. All three of them glare at him, even Sasuke, normally too dignified to act like he's been phased. Apparently his patience runs out before the four hour mark, because even he looks like he's about to start complaining out loud. He even opens his mouth to say something, but Naruto beats him to it.

"My time is too valuable for you to be wasting it!" he roars, shaking his fist in front of his face. "How am I ever gonna be Hokage at this rate?"

Sakura nods in agreement. "Do you expect us to train ourselves? Honestly!"

Apparently Sasuke is no longer interested in complaining as well, because he's back to looking away furiously and acting like he hasn't been paying attention.

Kakashi tips his head back and squints up at the sky. A single cloud floats just outside of his peripheral vision, languidly drifting out of sight behind the trees. Other than the one cloud, a couple of unidentifiable birds gliding by, and, of course, the sun, the sky is empty. The trees surrounding them on all sides are green and enormous and completely immobile because there hasn't been a breeze since he got here and it's incredibly hot outside in the still, stale summer air. It's much hotter than it was just yesterday. The shirt under his shirt under his vest is collecting sweat. No wonder the kids are so mad at him. Even out in this grassy field, it's positively broiling.

Lazily he rolls his head back into an upright position and stares at his students for several seconds. "Yeah..." he says, addressing the space between Sasuke and Naruto's heads. "Well, I would hope that you would have enough initiative to do at least _some_ kind of training in the mean time, instead of just whiling away the hours waiting for me. You know, you could have been practicing the exercise you didn't master yesterday."

"Are you seriously-" Naruto begins, but Kakashi continues, heedless of whatever it is Naruto is having a hard time believing.

"But, regardless of how you handled my exceptional lateness, it really shouldn't have happened in the first place, and I am very sorry for wasting your time." He has more to say, but beforehand he has to very loudly snort a large amount of mucus back into his sinuses. And then he has to simultaneously cough violently and sneeze several times so as to flush out said uncooperative sinuses again. And then he has to listen to Sakura being shocked and horrified that some kind of thing is happening.

"You are sick! I knew it!" she exclaims, as she wipes droplets of sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. "And it's even worse than it was yesterday!"

"Oh crap, I completely forgot about that! Are you okay, Kakashi-sensei?" asks Naruto, all traces of anger suddenly absent from his throaty, dehydrated voice.

Kakashi closes his eyes and lets loose an exasperated sigh. A shinobi must never question their commander; while he doesn't normally subscribe to this rule so strictly, he wonders if he should pretend he does.

"Yeah, so, guys, no," he says, rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. "Let's not care about this again, okay? I'm trying to be sorry or something."

"Kakashi-sensei, you said yesterday you weren't sick, but here you are today and you're even worse than you were!" Sakura repeats. Her forehead is beaded in sweat again, but for the time being she ignores it. "Isn't it worth caring about now?"

"I also said that you shouldn't care about it even if it does get worse."

"Well, clearly it's worse than you expected, if it's so bad you had to sleep in _that_ late!" Sakura looks at her teacher with wide eyes and frowning lips and clenched hands; for the first time since she began accusing him of being sick, she seems genuinely concerned.

Naruto scoffs. "I don't think his lateness has anything to do with it," he grumbles. "I think he's just lazy."

"Naruto!"

"Shikamaru should have been on your team, you would have got along great."

"_Naruto!_"

At the best of times, listening to the incessant bickering of his students for too long makes Kakashi's head hurt. On a day like today, with the sun bearing down on his overly dressed body and his sinuses heavy with excess mucus, it doesn't take them even half as much effort to annoy him to the point of physical pain. He releases his nose and massages his temples instead.

"Sakura, being late is not a symptom of a cold," he replies, coughing in between words. "Um, that is, I guess."

"Yeah, it is," she says. She approaches him with her hand stretched above her head, tries to clap it over his forehead. He steps out of the way so abruptly that she missteps and stumbles a little. She regains her balance quickly enough and scowls at him. "Hey, I almost tripped."

"Sorry, sorry. But you know, I don't have a fever. I promise."

"Are you _sure?_ You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell."

"Why not? I mean, it's happening to him, right?" Naruto asks, looking at Sasuke for some reason even though he's addressing Sakura. Sasuke sneers at him and snaps a twig in half with the bottom of his foot and continues ignoring everyone.

Sakura rolls her eyes. "Of course you wouldn't know, you can't even tell when you're eating month old food until you're barfing into the toilet for three day straight."

Naruto closes his eyes and frowns. "I resent that."

"Guys," Kakashi interrupts. "How about I put it this way. Training isn't an official mission, but it's your mission to be trained by me, okay? One of the first rules of shinobi conduct is 'a shinobi must always put the mission first.' So, care about your mission instead of my or Naruto's respective health status."

Unperturbed, Sakura completely ignores his request and once again reaches for Kakashi's face. "Just let me check, it takes like less than a second."

"Hey," Sasuke interjects, finally joining the party. He pulls at the front of his shirt flaps it back and forth like a completely ineffectual fan. "How about Kakashi just admits he's sick so that Naruto and Sakura can get off the subject and we can actually get anything done before we all die of heat exhaustion."

Kakashi is not just a little bit pissed that it only takes a minute of Naruto being needlessly offended before everyone drops the subject and picks up a rock.

* * *

Yeah, so that was cool. I don't like this chapter as much as the last one, but whatever! Thank you for reading! Have a nice insert-time-of-day-here.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3, hold the tomatoes.

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Usually when Kakashi sleeps through his alarm, it's because he accidentally set it to the radio instead of the buzzer. When on a mission, he can stay at least somewhat alert even while unconscious (a shinobi must always be alert to his surroundings, after all), but when he's at home, sleeping in a bed, almost nothing can rouse him. Barking dogs, screaming birds, screaming babies, screaming adults, breaking glass, even literal explosions have proven ineffective at disturbing his sleep; naturally, he has yet to find a radio station that is loud and obtrusive enough to work as an alarm. Only grating, mechanical beeping can reliably bestir him from slumber. Today, he sleeps through his alarm despite it being set to buzzer.

On those occasions when he does sleep through his alarm, he usually ends up sleeping in for an hour, maybe even two. It's one, though definitely not the only reason he is late to training so often, and specifically the reason he was late to training yesterday. Today, he sleeps through his alarm for six hours.

Somewhere in the back of his mind he realizes he should be surprised when his clock says "2:15" instead of an hour that could still be considered morning (and to discover that his alarm is actually made to _never stop beeping_ until the off button is pressed). Somewhere, very far away in the fringes of his bleary and only recently awakened consciousness, but that part of his mind is ignored, because a more prominent part doesn't care and is too tired and confused to remember how to read a clock. The curtains are drawn in front of his window so the room is sufficiently protected from the glaring afternoon sunlight, but not from the broiling afternoon heat, which is probably what did the job of waking him up for his poor, useless alarm clock. The window is cracked open a few inches at the bottom and the air that rolls in with the breeze is hot and humid and horrible and includes mosquitoes, one of which dances around his ear while he reaches around behind his head for the clock he put down before turning off for some reason. He manages to reach it and successfully turn it off instead of setting it to snooze and then settles back down into his bed and closes his eyes and tries to fall asleep again. It doesn't work, and after a few minutes of failing he throws his sheet so violently off of himself that it falls to the floor, rolls his legs off of the side of his bed and plants his feet on the floor without actually lifting his torso and getting up. He stays like this for several minutes, lying down with only half of his body and staring at the ceiling with one eye barely open enough to see through and the other entirely closed. The ceiling fan stopped moving at some point during the night and he has absolutely no idea why.

Eventually he summons the will to sit all the way up, but when he does he lifts his head too quickly and has to lean over into his knees and cradle his head in his hands, waiting for the dizziness to go away. His head is killing him and his face feels heavy, and even when his head stops spinning and his vision clears up it still feels like somebody shoved a bottle of glue up his nose and emptied it into his brain. His entire body is wet with drying sweat, and when he finally decides to stand up, the sheet under his legs tries to go with him before it peels away from his skin because it's stuck under his mattress. He throws his arms above his head and stretches, cracking the joints in his elbows and yawning. It still hasn't quite occurred to him that it's the middle of the afternoon yet, and he wastes another ten or so minutes standing in the middle of his room blinking stupidly and stretching his arms around himself before he looks at his door and notices that it is open.

This doesn't confuse him at first; he does occasionally forget to close his door if he leaves the room in the middle of the night. He only becomes confused when Sasuke walks in through his open door and tells him to put some god damn pants on before Sakura walks in and sees him in his underwear, and the realization that his students have broken into his apartment and turned off his ceiling fan and not-turned off his alarm and left his door open hits him like the pair of pants that Sasuke pulls out of his drawer and throws at his face.

Kakashi pulls his pants off of his head and onto his legs fast enough that he has time to put a shirt on before Naruto and Sakura join their teammate in Kakashi's one-room apartment that they weren't invited into. In Sakura's hands is a tray with a bowl of soup and a cup of tea on it; Naruto comes laden with a pitcher of water and an expression of mild disappointment.

"Oh, good, you're finally awake!" Sakura says, laying the tray on Kakashi's desk.

"Good thing for you, anyway," Naruto adds, frowning. "If you weren't, all of this water would have been dumped on your head."

Sighing heavily, running a long list of shinobi rules of conduct that are being violated at this very moment through his dopey, half-asleep mind, Kakashi wipes a hand over his face and pinches his eyes closed and asks why the three of them are here.

"Oh man, you're gonna flip out when I tell you!" Naruto begins, setting the pitcher down as delicately as he possibly can. Water spills out over the sides and forms a huge puddle in the middle of the floor. He clenches his fists and squawks excitedly. "I totally picked your locks, Kakashi-sensei! I finally figured out how! Isn't that cool?"

"Naruto, you spilled water everywhere!" Sakura scolds, whapping him lightly on the back of the head but making no move to, nor suggesting anyone else do anything about it.

"Clumsy idiot," Sasuke grunts, not taking his hands out of his pockets to perhaps make a move to mop the water up, to which Naruto cannot respond by offering to clean the mess he made himself, because it doesn't happen.

Kakashi sighs again, goes to one of his drawers and removes a towel with which to absorb the water no one else will take responsibility for. "You know, none of you are answering my question," he points out. He's about to say something else, but he stands up too quickly and is again overwhelmed by dizziness. As his room is extremely small (a shinobi must not complain about how spare his housing accommodations are unless he wants to buy a house), the middle of the room is close enough to the edge of his bed that he can sit back down on it without having to walk. Sakura jumps up, goes back to the tray she was carrying, picks up the cup of tea and brings it to him.

"The herbs in this tea are supposed to help with cold symptoms," she says, shoving the cup under his nose, not violently enough to spill any of it but close enough to his face that the steam burns the inside of his nostrils. "I figured you were too sick to get up, or else you wouldn't have been so late that you didn't even show up! And it looks like I was right, gosh, Kakashi-sensei, you can barely even stand!"

Though Kakashi is pretty certain that the reason he seems so disoriented right now is because he only really woke up about three minutes ago, he does feel a little worse than he did yesterday. For the last minute or so he's felt like he's going to sneeze, which is annoying and also something he really doesn't want to do while there's a cup of hot tea hovering under his face. He accepts the cup and puts it down on his windowsill. "Thank you," he says. "Ugh," he says. "Did you guys seriously break into my house just to make me tea?"

"I wouldn't call this a house, Kakashi-sensei," Naruto observes, accurately. "You have to share a bathroom with like, everyone on this floor. Why is your place even smaller than mine?"

Sasuke opens his mouth, presumably to say something, but is interrupted when Kakashi finally, after two minutes of waiting, actually sneezes. A box of tissues he doesn't own appears under his nose where the cup of tea used to be.

"We had to go to the store and buy these for you!" Sakura says from behind the box in her hand. "You didn't have any left, so we bought you three boxes."

"Thank you." Kakashi takes the box from her and puts it down next to the abandoned cup. He removes one tissue just in time to sneeze again, and then again, and then a third time, but unfortunately does not manage to use it to avoid getting such a large amount of mucus and spit in his shirt that it can be seen soaking through the fabric on the other side. Naruto points at him and accuses him of being gross while Sakura runs around his room pulling drawers open at random and asking him where he keeps his shirts so she can get him a new one. Sasuke has turned the ceiling fan back on and is complaining about how hot it is in this shitty little room, wondering aloud why Kakashi doesn't have an air conditioner, or even an electric fan, _anything_ but a ceiling fan that hardly moves and is missing a blade. How did he lose a ceiling fan blade? Why didn't he replace it? Why doesn't he just get an air conditioner? How did he sleep for so stupidly long in this heat?

A shinobi must never pick up his students and hurl them out of his window unless it is for some kind of training exercise. Instead, he politely demands that they leave, all of them, right now.

"Kakashi-sensei, you didn't drink your tea yet!" Sakura whines. She doesn't protest when he picks her up by the armpits and places her outside of his door, but she makes him promise to drink it before it gets cold and violently shoves a bag of the leaves she used to make it into his hands when she doesn't believe him. A few more seconds of not following Sakura and Naruto also has to be physically removed from the room. Sasuke gets the idea and leaves without being asked again. The door closes behind them and Kakashi, too weary and stupid from lifting children to check to see if his locks have been damaged, closes it by shoving the nearest heavy object in front of it with his foot. He can still hear them from the hallway, mumbling to each other about how annoyed they are about what just happened.

Before getting back into bed and falling asleep for another twelve hours, Kakashi staggers over to his windowsill and throws back the no-longer-steaming-hot tea in a few gulps. It tastes like licorice and is disgusting.

* * *

Thanks for reading! It's over! I hope you liked it! Bye!


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